2018-01-16

statistics arguments

Today Taisiya Kopytova (ASU) showed up to write up our results on element abundances and binarity in the APOGEE survey. My job is to write up some philosophy of the project. The methodology is extremely clean because we have structured it like a properly executed drug trial. I'm excited to propagate this methodology, that is only really possible in big data sets.

Alex Malz (NYU) and I started our discussion of how to finish his project on combining noisy photometric redshifts to obtain the full redshift distribution. It is a hard paper to write because it has a lot of non-trivial conceptual aspects to it. In particular, there is an argument in the literature that you can just stack the posterior PDFs that is wrong (it's provably correct and yet wrong!), and we have to rebut that without getting too much into the weeds.